‘Initiatives such as Soapbox Science at London’s Southbank Centre are valuable for widening people’s ideas of who scientists can be.’
Photograph: Anna Gordon

Why are so few women publishing scientific papers? It is a question that has been posed by New Scientist magazine, as it reports that in medicine, female authorship of scientific papers has started to go backwards. Since 2009, the proportion of women as lead authors has gone down.

Findings such as these usually provoke a cry of “We need more women in science!” and organisations wheel out a spokesperson to explain that girls should be encouraged to study science at university. The Welsh government, for example, celebrated International Women’s Day this way.

But while this is a fantastic way to persuade science funding bodies to reach into their pockets, it just doesn’t fit with the evidence. The quiet truth is this: women are doing science. And not only “more women than ever before”, as the New Scientist puts it. In fact, in lots of scientific disciplines women outnumber men.

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Don’t believe me? Recent data from the UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency (although not available online, I requested the gender breakdown from its press office) shows that 69% of students studying medical technology-related degrees are women, as are 86% of those studying degrees in polymers. A whopping 77% of students studying veterinary science are female. The figure for psychology is even higher at 79%. The majority of students studying degrees in anthropology (72%); ophthalmics (69%); anatomy, physiology and pathology (64%); zoology (63%); forensic and archaeological sciences (61%); and pharmacology, toxicology and pharmacy (61%) are female.

More women than men study clinical dentistry (59%); clinical medicine (55%); biology (58%); molecular biology, biophysics and biochemistry (54%); archaeology (56%); and “agriculture and related subjects” (67%). The story is the same in subjects such as genetics (57%) and microbiology (56%). For programmes classed as “broadly based programmes in medicine and dentistry”, the percentage of female students is even higher, at 76%. There may be more women studying full-time degrees across the board (54%), but there is still an undeniably strong female bias in science subjects.

If there are so many women studying medical subjects, how do we explain the sudden decline in female authorship in medical journals since 2009?

Instead of discussing gender bias, the New Scientist blames the “choice” to have a family. It points to a study in this month’s American Economic Review that shows women incurring earnings penalties in science if they have children. A recent House of Commons science and technology committee report goes into more detail, saying that scientific research careers are dominated by short-term contracts with poor job security – at the very time of life that women need to have children (if they want them). The female postdoctoral scientist faces difficult decisions while stuck on fixed-term contracts before tenure, with very little in the way of institutional support. Women should not have to choose between career and family, says the science magazine. But surely male scientists face similar choices?

Apparently not. European social science research shows that male and female scientists often have different types of partners: male scientists more frequently have a stay-at-home partner looking after the children, while female scientists are more likely to have another scientist as a spouse. So male scientists might not need family-friendly working practices to have a successful career but female scientists do. Hence the loss of women in the “leaky pipeline” of scientific careers. And that is to say nothing of the research that found scientists perceived job applicants to be less competent when they had female names.

Does this matter? It does. Male-dominated science and technology allowed women to be killed by first-generation car airbags at speeds of only 20mph, because engineers did not foresee that breasts close to the wheel could push airbags up towards the neck. And as Naomi Wolf pointed out in her book Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire, over the centuries anatomists forgot about and “re-discovered” the clitoris at least six times before the scientist Helen O’Connell stepped in...

Small wonder, then, that the Commons science and technology committee argues that the usual emphasis on inspiring girls to go into science careers is not enough, saying: “Efforts are wasted if women are subsequently disproportionately disadvantaged in scientific careers compared to men.”

And yet still we are told we need to inspire more girls. Lobbying groups are much more vocal about the need to recruit women into science than they are about what needs to be done to retain females in science after graduation.

A rare article in this month’s issue of the journal Science might explain why. After detailing shocking examples of discrimination and misogyny – from inappropriate discussions about rape and the female anatomy to colleagues’ failure to acknowledge female expertise, the author writes: “It may be too much to ask women in science organisations to change misogynist culture in a world that remains misogynistic.”

Sure, initiatives such as Soapbox Science at London’s Southbank Centre this week are valuable for widening people’s ideas of who scientists can be. But the sad fact is it is much easier to say “we need more women in science” than it is to stand up, look the (mostly male) leaders in science and politicians in the eye and say: “Your laboratories, hiring procedures, grant-allocating processes and publishing routines are all sexist, and this results in science and technologies that aren’t good for at least half the population. Why have you allowed this to continue for so long?”